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YUM! Tools for IBM PowerLinux servers - Help for those installing or running Linux on IBM Power Systems

For many years, the IBM eClient Support Tools team in Austin, Texas,
has been working hand-in-hand with IBM Linux Technology Center teams in
both the United States and Brazil to provide a web site that contains a
set of tools for users running Linux on IBM Systems with POWER-based
technology.

The Service and productivity tools for POWER Linux users
site began by providing several diagnostic tools, often called RAS
tools (Reliability, Availability, Scalability), for supported Linux
distributions on IBM Power Systems. Originally, the site included tools
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
(SLES) on three different types of Power Systems platforms:

IBM Power Systems managed by an HMC (Hardware Management Console) or by IVM (Integrated Virtualization Manager)

IBM Power-based blade servers

IBM Power Systems that are not blades and not managed by IVM or an HMC.

Most of the RAS tools helped system administrators with various
hardware diagnostics. Over the years, we added tools to help with such
things as performance management and other productivity issues. Users
would go to the site, click the link for their Linux distribution (RHEL
or SLES) on the appropriate platform, and then download the various
tools.

Next, we added the IBM Installation Toolkit for PowerLinux
servers and the IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for PowerLinux
servers to the site.

The site has always been useful, but downloading the service and
productivity tools individually could be cumbersome, even though most
RPMs were small.

What did we do about it?

To address the multiple downloads issue, we added YUM repository
capability in 2012. YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a
package-management utility for Linux RPMs. It is Open Source and runs
from the command line. From the RAS tools site, you can download the RPM
that configures your Linux installation to download and install
packages from the YUM repository, making both downloading and
installation of these tools much easier.

The LTC teams refer to this YUM repository as the IBM PowerLinux Tools
Repository. It hosts all the RAS tools and the tools in the IBM SDK for
PowerLinux package.

What about the future?

We plan to keep improving support for Linux distributions. In fact, the
LTC team for the service and productivity tools is planning to add
support for Fedora in 2013. I'm excited to work with the LTC team to
improve support for users who run Linux on POWER-based IBM Systems.

Check out The PowerLinux Community blog: http://ow.ly/2ugbhB
and follow IBM Power eSupport @IBMPowereSupp and @kakinikole on Twitter
for tweets about new blog posts and other information from the IBM
PowerLinux community and other blogs on things Power related.

AuthorKathy Nichols, Web Content Architect, eClient Support:
Electronic Tools Team, Austin, Texas. Long-time technical writer and
support content specialist, Kathy was on the original AIX Support Tools
Team (1994-1996) and on the expanded POWER Tools Team from 2002 to the
present. Charter member of the FLRT team. A movie of her life would be
called “Knit. Write. Cook”. Twitter: @kakinikole, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kakinikole